Holographic transport and density waves

Abstract

We consider transport of heat and charge in holographic lattices which are phases of strongly coupled matter in which translations are broken explicitly. In these systems, we study a spontaneous density wave that breaks translations incommensurately to the lattice. The emergent gapless mode due to symmetry breaking couples to the heat current impacting transport at low frequencies. We study the effects of this coupling when the mode is freely sliding as well as after the introduction of a small deformation parameter which pins down the density wave. We prove that the DC transport coefficients are discontinuous in the limit of the pinning parameter going to zero. From the perspective of finite frequency thermoelectric conductivity, this limiting process is accompanied by the transfer of spectral weight to frequencies set by the pinning parameter. As expected, for weak momentum relaxation, this spectral weight transfer appears as a shift of the Drude peak.

24 pages, fixed typos, version to appear on JHEP

References in corpus (6)

• Lectures on Holographic Superfluidity and Superconductivity
• Universality of the hydrodynamic limit in AdS/CFT and the membrane paradigm
• Thermoelectric DC conductivities from black hole horizons
• Quantum Critical Transport and the Hall Angle
• The thermoelectric properties of inhomogeneous holographic lattices
• Holographic Checkerboards

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Gapless and gapped holographic phonons
• Magnetophonons & type-B Goldstones from Hydrodynamics to Holography
• On the hydrodynamics of (2 + 1)-dimensional strongly coupled relativistic theories in an external magnetic field